


In the Middle Space

by QuickLikeLight



Series: Series Finale [2]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Angst, F/F, Fluff, Pack Dynamics, Purgatory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-23
Updated: 2015-03-23
Packaged: 2018-03-19 08:19:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3603012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickLikeLight/pseuds/QuickLikeLight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Allison waits for Lydia in the middle space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Middle Space

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
> [ ](http://quicklikelight.tumblr.com/post/137861404566/allison-waits-for-lydia-in-the-middle-space)  
> 
> 
>   
> 
> 
> * * *
> 
> An anonymous user asked for a happy Allydia headcanon and I ??? did this. The Middle Space is a sort of purgatory, so while there are character deaths, they all happen offscreen. Side pairings include: Scott McCall/Stiles Stilinski, Braeden/Derek Hale, Vernon Boyd/Erica Reyes, Malia Tate/Kira Yukimura
> 
> Yes, the idea of the Middle Space does come from LOST. Because I loved LOST. So take that. Influenced heavily by [Hozier's "Work Song"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH7bjV0Q_44).
> 
> ETA: Um apparently this thing is much more sad than I originally intended or thought it was, so I've added an angst tag and also I apologize to those of you who read it without that warning. <3 Take care of yourselves friends.

Allison waits for Lydia in the middle space.

It’s a cabin in the wood, sort of, she thinks. There are trees outside, and seasons, and sometimes she goes for long walks until she reaches a shoreline that she stays far away from. The water is black and silver and red, and she knows it would be refreshing, feel so good to jump in and swim to the other side, but she can’t.

Not yet.

Because Allison needs to meet Lydia in the middle space.

So she waits. It seems that she waits forever, but also only a few days. She takes up spinning, because in the middle space she knows how, and it feels good to do something with her hands that isn’t maiming, killing. She spins fine, soft fiber into yarn, spools and spools of thread that she puts on a shelf, organizes by color. She doesn’t sleep, really, though she does sometimes lay down and dream of home, of her father and of Scott and of Lydia’s singing voice which is terrible, even in her dreams, but never fails to make her laugh.

She goes for walks and she spins thread and she dreams while waking. And she waits for Lydia in the middle space.

People walk by her cabin sometimes. She sees Erica and Boyd, and it seems like maybe they have a cabin of their own. She wants to visit them, to beg their forgiveness, but she only sees them once in the wood, and then no more for a long time.

She sees Derek. He asks for tea, oddly enough, and she has a teapot so she makes some for him. They talk about life as if it is still happening and yet it ended a thousand years ago, all at once. He tells her about his sister, as if they’d been friends. She thinks maybe she would have liked to be friends.

Derek stays around, prowling the wood and howling for his pack. She sees him with the betas, with Isaac. Isaac doesn’t come to her cabin, but she sees him, and he smiles when he waves at her. Old hurts matter little in the middle space.

Braeden, a woman she had thought long dead, joins them next. When Derek sees her his eyes light up, and he runs to her like a boy, with joy in his face. She runs to meet him too. Allison watches from her porch with a smile.

Malia comes, the girl that was a coyote, and she seems... different, than when Allison saw her last, fearful and trembling in her human skin. She curls up in a nest on the ground and she cries for days, for weeks, aching for someone she left behind.

“You don’t understand,” she sobs, as Allison cradles her body, offers her a shoulder. Her heart aches too. She knows this pain.

“We’ll wait for her,” Allison says, and Derek shakes his head.

“We can’t,” Malia argues, heartsore and bleary eyed. “She’ll live forever. She’ll have forgotten us. She’ll… she’ll have forgotten me.”

“If she loves you like you love her, she won’t forget,” Allison says, and she knows in her heart that it’s true, just as she knows the scent of Lydia’s hair and the taste of her mouth and the brush of her fingers against Allison’s fingers. “A thousand years is a long time to wait, but we’ll stay. If it will make you happy, we’ll wait for her too.”

Malia stops crying. Eventually.

Scott and Stiles show up together, within seconds of one another, still curled around each other like they’re afraid to be separated. Allison hugs them both, happy tears spilling from her eyes. Lydia’s name is at the tip of her tongue, but as she watches them together she realizes that they’ve become something other, unto themselves, a new entity that was born before she ever came to Beacon Hills, and will live long past the middle space. So she lets Lydia’s name go, hugs them again, and welcomes them inside.

She goes for walks. She spins fiber into thread. She makes tea. She offers comfort. She runs with the pack.

Cora slips in quietly, barely a sound as she joins the pack, stands proud and tall beside her brother, takes her rightful place at his right hand. Derek seems to breathe easier with her there, which is a strange thing considering they’re all dead.

It is an even stranger day when Jackson ends up in the forest, looking terrified and alone. She hangs back, watchful and curious, as Isaac goes to him, welcomes him back into the fold. She can hear as well as they can in this space, and she hears him say “It’s all forgotten here, Jacks. Come home. Stay with us.”

She doesn’t think he will, but he does. At night she hears the wolves howling, running through a moonless wood on all fours. She and Stiles exchange secret smiles, knowing what it is to love a wolf, and go back to their separate tasks. He whittles, a trade he learned while alive. He makes beautiful figurines out of the wood of the fallen branches here, and every day Scott coos over them, peppers his face with kisses and tells him that they are beautiful, that he is beautiful.

She loves the ache it fills her with.

Lydia stumbles into the wood at night, still screaming.

Allison wakes in her soft bed and realizes she had been sleeping. She runs to the sound, that familiar pull of a voice in the darkness, and finds Lydia there on her knees at the edge of the shore, hands inches from the water.

“I’m here,” Allison says, wrapping her arms around Lydia’s shivering form. She pulls her back from the edge, pulls her girl back into the cover of trees and darkness and away from the beautiful temptation of the water. “I’m here, I’m here. I’ve been waiting for you. God, I’ve been waiting for you.”

Lydia looks at her, stunned, eyes wide and misty as her breathless scream fades out on a whimper, leads into a kiss. Her mouth is perfection, the way it had looked in life, before. They kiss until the light rises, golden and warm on their shoulders, and she can hear the pack stirring in the wood.

“Come,” she says, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“You have,” Lydia corrects. “You waited for me, for all this time, even though you didn’t know if I’d come.”

“You found me,” Allison shrugs. “We waited for you.”

Lydia fits as seamlessly into her life as everyone else has, here in the middle space. She takes the yarn that Allison has spun and weaves it into blankets, into scarves and hats and something that looks endearingly like a cape that she offers Derek. He wears it manfully around the forest with a smile on his face that Allison never saw in the life before. Lydia sings, still pitchy and off key, and it makes them all grin to hear it. She strikes up games of chess with Stiles, playing with pieces he created on a board that Scott painted. They have a bonfire with Derek, Braeden, and the betas, and though there is no moon to call to, they still call out into the darkness.

Malia still cries sometimes.

Allison stops thinking of the life before as having been life.

Lydia follows her when she takes her walks, skips rocks along the face of the water, still and moving at the same time. She follows Allison when they explore the woods, searching for an end to the trees that surround them on all sides. She follows Allison into bed, where they make love like they didn’t in the life before, all hot kisses and shared breath and deep happiness, overwhelming. When the light rises and gilds Lydia’s skin, turns her hair to golden fire and her lips to strawberries and her skin to precious metal, Allison kisses her as if the middle space is all that matters.

Anymore, it is.

They aren’t expecting it the day it happens. Lydia is weaving on the porch, small loom set up there in the air that she shares with Stiles as they work side by side. He carves a tree stump, a familiar shape that pokes at Allison’s memory, but she can’t place it really. He works on it for hours before sighing and tossing it aside, looking for Scott in the distance and winking at him before grabbing up another block of untreated wood.

“Can’t get it?” Lydia asks, looking single-mindedly at the capelet she’s weaving together of deep purple thread.

“Can’t remember the details exactly,” Stiles shrugs. “I don’t know what it is I’m getting wrong though. Just that it’s… wrong.”

“I remember that feeling,” Lydia says, and she looks up from her work to shoot Allison a smile. Her stare fixates past Allison, though, at some point deep in the wood, and she draws in a breath the way she used to before, when they knew to expect the worst.

She doesn’t scream. She looks to the den that Malia sleeps in, just a small thing all on her own, and nods.

“It’s time,” she says, and Allison stills.

Out of the wood walks Kira, filled with light and searching frantically for a mess of a girl who has been waiting for her all this time.

“You’re here!” Malia growls, hugging her as tears spill down her face.

“I couldn’t stay away.” Kira sounds sorry, but she smiles as she kisses Malia soundly, and looks for the others. “Scott?”

“I’m here,” he says, “We’re all here.”

And suddenly they are.  The whole of them, the pack, the people Allison knew and grew with, the ones she loved and hated and loved again, the humane and the bestial in one tight circle, surrounding the marred carving of the tree stump Stiles threw on the ground.

“We’re all here,” she repeats, looking each of them in the eyes for as long as she can. There’s a completeness in her now, with Lydia at her side and her pack all around, facing this together. “We made it.”

“Thank you,” Scott says, and his voice shakes, but Stiles holds his hand, bolsters him up. “Thank you for making this for us. For bringing us here.”

It’s true, and Allison knows it. The middle space is her own creation, a labor of love she built for them to come to, to rest in, to gather and regroup before their last, long journey. A place for them to find one another again, so that they can face the end as they always should have: together.

“I built it for you,” she says to them, and they nod as if they’d known all along. She turns to Lydia, presses a kiss to her forehead and squeezes her hand tight. She whispers, “I built it for you.”

 

On the shore of the black water, they stand together in a line. They cling tight to each other, holding fiercely against the promise of the tide. Derek nods at each of the betas, tells them in a quavering voice, “You did it. You made it here. I’m proud of you. I’m proud of us.”

Scott smiles and does his version of the same speech, soft eyes resting on each of them in turn. “We did this together in the life before. We’ll do it again the life after. Hold tight this one last time. Don’t let go. We’ll all be together the way we should be.”

Lydia squeezes her hand, and Allison says, “The middle space was my last wish. To be with you all again before the end of everything. I don’t know that this is the end, though. It… it feels like a beginning.”

Lydia kisses her, soft and sweet and open and free. It feels like a beginning.

They walk across dark water, clinging tight to the hands that clung in the life before, and when they reach the other side, no one has been lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Your feedback is valuable to all fic writers, and I'm no exception. If you enjoyed this story, please let me know.
> 
> Come find me on [tumblr](http://quicklikelight.tumblr.com).


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